Help that hinders? The impact of donors’ provisions on community participation in local environmental governance

A number of success stories in environmental projects have the common denominator of expressing context specificity and thorough engagement with local institutions (Milupi and Somers, 2017). Locally based approaches to environmental governance are thus increasingly valued, resulting in a renovated attention to context and culture-specific solutions in environmental programmes. A precondition for that is the possibility for local communities to share decision-making power in the design, implementation and monitoring of projects. In the Global South, a number of local NGOs take community participation as a key tenet of their action. Yet, however desirable, promoting community participation is not always an easy task to perform. Let aside cultural, political and social contingencies that are peculiar to specific contexts, there are external constraints that can help or hinder NGOs’ performance in this sense, among which resource-dependency dynamics stand out as particularly relevant; donors essentially hold power over NGOs, that must stick to specific conditions in order to grant their support (Choudry and Kapoor 2013; Mueller‐Hirth 2012). On the other hand, recent literature (Agyemang et al. 2017; Yasmin et al., 2018; Uddin 2019), claims that donors’ conditions on project funding often present enabling features for community participation, embedded in accountability mechanisms such as the involvement of grassroots groups, participatory monitoring, evaluation and lessons learning. Following this, criticism surrounding accountability to donors is sometimes misplaced. Donors unquestionably have the power to affect local NGOs’ ability to deliver on their goal of helping communities to pursue their needs and claims. Literature on development and advocacy initiatives (see Andrews 2014; Kilby 2006), indicates the allocation of core funding (as opposed to project funding), long implementation timeframes and flexibility in monitoring and evaluation standards as facilitating elements in this sense. However, the study of power dynamics between donors and NGOs remains understudied in the field of environmental projects, making it a topic of fresh relevance. In this paper, I investigate what type of donors and what conditions facilitate or hinder NGOs in this sense, by analyzing the impact of donors' funding on local communities involved in environmental projects. This is done by exploring donors’ guiding principles, eligibility criteria and monitoring and evaluation standards, delving into the provisions of five different funders that financially support local environmental projects in Southern Africa, classified according to their stated values and organizational settings. Data are collected, coded and analyzed with the help of NVIVO through a content analysis of calls for grants, blog articles, reports and interviews to donors and NGOs’ practitioners, that reveal distinctions and overlaps among different organizations. Results show that organizations that adopt a flexible approach to grant-making and whose relationship with NGOs is based on equal partnership and trust are more likely to facilitate communities’ self-determination of needs and claims related to environmental governance projects, while for those with stricter conditions, the pursuit environmental goals can dismiss the self-determination of local communities as a secondary matter.